The Jazz Crusaders - Live Sides
Released - 1980
Recording and Session Information
"The Lighthouse", Hermosa Beach, CA, November 10-13, 1967
Wayne Henderson, trombone; Wilton Felder, tenor sax; Joe Sample, piano; Stix Hooper, drums; and Buster Williams, bass.
Native Dancer
The Emperor
Impressions
"The Lighthouse", Hermosa Beach, CA, July 26 & 27, 1969
Wayne Henderson, trombone; Wilton Felder, tenor sax; Joe Sample, piano, electric piano; Stix Hooper, drums; and Buster Williams, bass.
It's Gotta Be Real
Inside The Outside
Reflections
Track Listing
| Side One | ||
| Title | Author | Recording Date |
| Impressions | John Coltrane | November 10-13 1967 |
| The Emperor | Charles Williams | November 10-13 1967 |
| It's Gotta Be Real | Larry Ramos | July 26/27 1969 |
| Side Two | ||
| Inside The Outside | Stix Hooper | July 26/27 1969 |
| Reflections | Wayne Henderson | July 26/27 1969 |
| Native Dancer | Charles Williams | November 10-13 1967 |
Liner Notes
THE JAZZ CRUSADERS
For a number of reasons, six of the best of which are offered in this album, the Jazz Crusaders established themselves as one of the most popular, successful groups of the 1960's, earning critical accolades for the fervent creativity and driving intensity of its music while at the same time attracting a sizable audience to its vigorous, unpretentious and hugely exciting approach to modern Jazz. From the beginning the group was able to reconcile the often conflicting demands of art and commerce with suprising ease and, it would appear, with absolutely no compromise of, or adjustment to the fundamental approach with which it first burst onto the national scene and quickly established itself as a vital new force to be reckoned with. In the group's first LP, FREEDOM SOUND (Pacific Jazz 27), released during May of 1961, was defined the basic sound of the group — spruce, brash, exuberant, earthy and enticing — which over the ensuing decade was refined, deepened and intensified but never really changed. What did happen during that time was that the band, already strong and cohesive, simply got better at doing what it did.
That the Jazz Crusaders were able to achieve such a phenomenal popular acceptance within such a short time of their appearance is due to the fact that they arrived so well equipped to do so, no less than to the fact that the approach they brought with them not only was fully formed but perfectly suited to the musical consciousness then taking shape among many jazz listeners across the country. The four men who made up the group — tenor saxophonist Wilton Felder, trombonist Wayne Henderson, pianist Joe Sample and drummer Nesbert "Stix" Hooper — had been performing as a unit for the greater part of the preceding decade and as a result had developed, in critic Richard Hadlock's apt phrase, "a remarkable degree of maturity and ensemble rapport to their collective playing." The four had begun playing together as youngsters attending the same Houston, Texas, high school, and shared a common interest and listening experience in blues and rhythm-and-blues of the period (early 1950s), including the music of blues greats B.B. King and Bobby "Blue" Bland and local Texans Lightnin' Hopkins, Smokey Hogg and Gatemouth Brown, among many others.
"That's where the natural feeling came from," Sample recalled some years later. "From listening to black radio and learning the blues, and getting all those old Gospel influences, the old Baptist churches that had tambourines and piano players and choirs." As high school students, 13 to 15 years in age, they formed a group, which they called the Swingsters, and sought to perform blues and like musics, teaching themselves the fundamentals of improvising on these simple, bedrock forms. Soon modern jazz, and bebop in particular, was added to their listening experience and a new dimension to their ever-deepening musical experiments.
"That music was different from the blues," Hooper said of the group's early exposure to the recordings of Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Max Roach, Thelonious Monk and others, "so we started listening to it and developing our own style. We incorporated the refinement and spontaneous improvisation of jazz, but we never lost our earthy roots. We weren't West Coast musicians, and we weren't East Coast musicians. We were Gulf Coast musicians, and we were unique. Our roots were so deep that if we played 'ROUND MIDNIGHT, STRAIGHT NO CHASER, BYE BYE BLACKBIRD or any of those other jazz standards, even then they had those funky feelings under them. It was just natural for us to play with those inflections."
Over the next five or six years, during which they graduated high school and attended Texas Southern University, the four worked regularly in the Houston and adjacent Gulf Coast area, performing in nightclubs and lounges, at dances, proms, parties and other public and private social affairs. They played jazz as often as circumstances permitted but more often found it necessary to perform that exciting, rhythmically potent mixture of r&b and jazz generally labeled "jump music" so popular with black listeners in Texas and elsewhere. They backed local and touring singers, played standards, popular songs of the day and straightahead rhythmic fare for dancers. In short, they furnished music for hard-drinking, -living and -working people out for a good time who wanted their music strong, direct, sincere and, above all, hard swinging. Through these experiences the group, which had rechristened itself the Modern Jazz Sextet — its membership swelled to that size through the addition of a bassist and a young saxophonist-guitarist and novice flutist named Hubert Laws — learned the strong, forthright communicative skills so greatly in evidence even in its earliest recordings.
Lured by the promise of a recording contract that failed to materialize, the Modern Jazz Sextet made the move to Los Angeles in 1958. They soon found that Jazz jobs were in short supply, however, and in order to make ends meet were forced to regroup as a r&b unit, taking the name the Night Hawks and adding vocalist Micki Lynn and an electric organ. While lucrative, the music finally proved stultifying and, after several months' work in a Las Vegas lounge, the group was ready to return to Los Angeles and to jazz. Through the intervention of saxophonist Curtis Amy, another Texan and a long-time booster of the group, they were signed to a recording contract with Pacific Jazz Records, Following the release of a Single by the Night Hawks, which made not a ripple in the marketplace, the group recorded their first album as the Jazz Crusaders. The reaction was not long in coming, and it was overwhelmingly enthusiastic.
Almost immediately, the Jazz Crusaders were recognized as an exceptionally talented, cohesive and exciting musical collective. Jazz writer Frank Kofsky, in his DOWN BEAT review of their debut album, described them as "one of the outstanding new groups made up of younger musicians...Barely out of their teens, they nonetheless play, for the most part, with the assurance of more mature men." After commenting on the high quality of their compositions, he went on to note, "This, coupled with their long-time association, allowed them to build a repertoire and group sound that grab and hold your attention." Hadlock characterized their music as comprising, "The full cry of youth with the wisdom of long working experience." He noted in addition, "This is what jazzmen call a 'hard' band, in which each musician gives his all to every performance. The result is a rushing, vociferous spiral of sound that forever threatens to soar beyond the limits of control, but somehow never does. Tempering this ferocity of musical outlook is a deep vein of affability that seems to characterize the Crusaders' collective and individual playing styles."
This appealing combination of mind and heart — of intelligent, disciplined musicianship leavened by a deep, unfeigned and heatedly emotional attack — gave the group's music easy accessibility for the average listener, leading to wide popular acceptance, "During the 1960s," Sample observed, "we were among the top jazz groups as far as the public was concerned. In the public's eye we were up there with Miles Davis, Horace Silver, Dave Brubeck and Art Blakey." Much of the reason for this popularity stemmed from the group's insistence on the direct, forceful communication of honest emotion in its music and the corollary rejection of specious sophistication, of complexity for its own sake, "We always wanted to make the music feel good," Felder emphasized. "We wanted the people to dig us for what we were, and not say, 'I have to dig •em because they say they're great, and because what they're doing is beyond my comprehension, so therefore it must be good'."
"First of all',' he explained, "90 % of an audience — even in classical music — are average people who respond to two basic things; the pulsation and the mood that it generates. They can appreciate a guy's technical facility, but they don't know it would have been hipper if he would have altered the change in the third beat, and by so doing would have made himself into a genius. A lot of musicians were into that — that technical approach, that chops attitude — so we shied away from it."
They were wise to do so, to play and be themselves in their music, to address themselves to the average listener to whom virtuosity and complexity meant little. It was by doing 60 that the Crusaders were able to bring off the difficult feat of satisfying critic, aficionado and casual listener alike —and without having to dilute or change in any way the hard-driving, infectious mainstream jazz style they had perfected over the previous decade.
Communication was, after all, the group's primary goal and they were consistently successful in realizing it, no better or more fully than in live performance. For this reason, the recordings they made on a regular basis at Howard Rumsey's congenial jazz club, The Lighthouse, in Hermosa Beach, ca., remain among the group's finest and most enduringly effective performances. An aware, responsive audience always drew from the Crusaders the best they were capable of giving, and the excitement that in this situation crackled like an electric charge between players and listeners is perfectly captured in the six spirited performances that make up this album, drawn from sets taped at the beachfront club in 1968 (IMPRESSIONS, NATIVE DANCER and THE EMPEROR) and the following year (INSIDE THE OUTSIDE, REFLECTIONS and IT'S GOTTA BE REAL). And real it is too — cooking, invigorating, hard-driving and unrelentingly exploratory playing by five compulsive swingers and natural communicators.
Filling out the group was young Los Angeles bassist Charles "Buster" Williams who had been performing regularly as a Crusader for well more than a year when the earlier of the two sets of performances was recorded, He was one of a number of excellent bassists who had worked with the group over the years when following their return to Los Angeles their original bassist was, in Hooper's words, "lost permanently to rock and roll" Williams, in addition to his superlative rhythmic, melodic and harmonic skills, was a gifted composer as well and during his stint contributed a number of excellent pieces to the group's repertoire, two of the most gripping of which are included here, the dramatic, lovely THE EMPEROR which, by being simultaneously grave and playful, recalls nothing so much as vintage Miles, and the strong and sprightly NATIVE DANCER with its solid groove and distinctive rhythmic character spurring the soloists to their best.
Two other pieces come from within the group: Wayne Henderson was responsible for the moody, long- lined REFLECTIONS, a feature for his fluent Johnsonian tromboning and Sample's swirling pianistics, while Hooper's jaunty, immediately familiar INSIDE THE OUTSIDE, more in than out, draws striking solos from Felder, Henderson and Sample in that order. IT'S GOTTA BE REAL, an unusually interesting pop song by Larry Ramos featured in the Paramount film Goodbye Columbus, is given a restrained, gently misterioso performance by the group, with splendid solo work by the three principal players, propelled with deft vigor by Hooper's spruce drumming and Williams' bass heartbeat. And last but by no means least is the group's steaming version of John Coltranes's IMPRESSIONS, a potent, persuasive performance notable mainly for Felder's long, lashing, serpentine improvisation, cry-filled and plentifully inventive, following which Sample rises splendidly to the challenge with a churning, vigorous, mobile solo of his own.
If you've not heard the Jazz Crusaders before or are familiar only with the recordings they've made recently and want to hear what they sounded like before they dropped the word "Jazz" from their name, this is a good place to start. It's a perfect one-LP distillation of the qualities that made the group one of the top attractions of the last two decades, offering a generous sampling of that mixture of, in Stix Hooper's words, "the refinement and spontaneous improvisation of jazz" and "our earthy r&b roots" that characterized the Jazz Crusaders' approach from the start and satisfied so many listeners over the years. And as you'll hear, their special recipe still is mighty nourishing.
Pete Welding
